


the stars would do the telling

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: A Princess and a Smuggler, Except One of Them's a Hot Guy and One of Them's an On Point Rey in a Vest, F/M, Ladies On Top Appreciation Society, Saddle Up for Some Serious Han/Leia Vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 16:31:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13080819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: One disdainful.One cocky.A royal and a smuggler, almost alone in the universe.One unready.One unflinching.Ben and Rey, almost lost in each other.





	the stars would do the telling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [insideimfeelindirty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insideimfeelindirty/gifts).



> For she who listens to all my crap, comforts me through it all and picks up the pieces of my broken heart on a regular basis.

“What,” he enquires, lip curled. “Is that?”

“That,” she replies tartly. “Is the smuggler who’s going to get you out of here.”

Younger than him, certainly, and inadequately dressed for both her frame and the season in her grey vest and oil-smeared trousers; she looks like a smuggler, dirt so deep under her fingernails that it’s probably ingrained in the flesh, and not a lot like anything else, except when it comes to the eyes. They go up a little at the corners, and the irises are deep hazel, green and brown –

Like his father’s.

Poe takes a breath in the silence between them, then fills it. “Rey has agreed to help us, Excellency. She says she can get us off the planet.”

“And can you?”

Smaller than him too, fragile-looking. Her wrist bones belong to a bird, her sharp chin to an obstinate child. Rey stares determinedly at and through the ambassador, dropping her head back on her neck as if already leaning back in the pilot’s chair, already in complete command. Half-starved grease monkey she may be, but that doesn’t preclude a show of dominance fit to make a dignitary of the New Republic bristle.

“If I can’t, no one can.”

Ben wants to shift his gaze – to Poe, to the ceiling, to the shade drawn over the window and the battle raging outside – but a strange paralysis of the extraocular muscles keeps his eyes pointing forward, fixed on her. If only she would blink. If only she would flinch. If only the corners of her mouth would stop curling determinedly upward, smug, challenging, unawed by the awesome presence of the son of a senator and a smuggler and a princess and a war hero, royalty in every way there was to be royal.

“Fine.” He makes an impatient gesture with his fingers, but either the flicker in her peripheral vision nor his obvious distaste slow the progression of her smirk. “If there really is no other way –”

“No, Excellency.” Poe, saturnine, handsome and incapable of getting them past the blockade, appears genuinely apologetic (which he’d better be, and which his employer plans to express to him later).

“No.” She, the smuggler, the girl pops the O, making it somehow obscene. “ _Excellency_.”

**.**

“What do you think you’re doing?!”

“Take your hands off me, Excellency, or I won’t be able to do it.”

The ship is careering wildly from side-to-side, Poe and BB-8 are skidding and rolling with the motion in a manner which would be incredibly amusing if Ben weren’t entirely consumed with gripping the girl’s shoulders. Though it isn’t his intention and though he would never mean to hurt her, his grasp is slowly immobilise her arms and grip on the controls; she might snap, shoulders like that beneath hands like that, nerves juddering to a halt along the borders of her muscles, but the thought doesn’t make him draw back –

If anything, he squeezes harder.

“Unless you’d like us to die in this asteroid field, of course.” Rey calmly flips a switch beside the right joystick, ignoring the creeping numbness in her arms (because giving him the satisfaction is both more and exactly what she wants to do).

Releasing her, scowling, Ben throws himself down into the co-pilot’s seat with enough force to make it judder. He’s much too big for it, limbs too long, head too high, opinion of himself too high for ripped cushions which will cover his tailored leggings and shirt with specks of insulation and tiny comfort-enhancing freshness pods, their scent long since gone. This ship is so much garbage, and flying it into an asteroid field is so much lunacy.

“You’re reckless,” he accuses.

“That’s why you pay me, or why you will, anyhow.”

She’s different in profile, he observes. Her lips pull back from her teeth in a soft snarl of concentration, tendrils of hair brush back and forth, back and forth, over her cheek. The veins in her wrist stand out electric blue, popping like cables sparking as the joint suddenly twists and Poe and BB-8 hurtle halfway down a hallway (unanchored, the better to watch the inevitable sport between Rey No-Second-Name, smuggler, and Ben Organa Solo, Ambassador from Hosnian Prime). He sees the kick of the left-hand thrustor carry on up her arm and into her shoulder, shaking her like a desert wind, but nothing closer in than her clavicle even twitches.

“But staring is extra.”

“Believe me, Captain, there’s nothing here worthy of my notice.”

**.**

“What’s your endgame here, Excellency?”

“You know, you don’t have to call me that.” The hairs on his forearm are singed and stinking, and the unpleasant sliding sensation on his forehead is sweat – it’s both familiar and unfamiliar to Ben, who was raised amongst couplings, compressors, sensors, guidance systems, who was once used to scorching himself with the delicate tools necessary for the delicate art of sticking things back together.

The scratch, scratch, scratch of power at the base of his skull begs him to use something other than Han Solo’s lessons to fix the drive, but the Force willed to a Skywalker resides in an Organa now, and he isn’t so willing to use something which might one day destroy him over nothing.

“Ben is…acceptable.”

“Sure it is, Excellency.” Nonchalantly, without asking, Rey takes hold of his burned arm by the elbow. She squints at the angry-looking patch of skin, oblivious to the invisible sparks which have found some invisible way to flow from a misplaced input and into her and into him. Something else scratch, scratch, scratches at the base of his skull.

He swallows.

“Ben.”

She ignores him. “You need a moisture pack for this.”

“It’s fine.”

“You have a funny definition of fine, Excellency.” Her fingertip hovers over the red scales of the burn, eyes flicking upward. She regards him sardonically from under her lashes, waiting; he tries to wrench his arm back, but his fingers catch on her elbow in turn, and besides, she has a grip that would choke him if it were on his throat.

(They may as well be).

Ben wishes he were on another starship, another planet, anywhere else.

“I can take care of myself.”

She scoffs. “Oh, you can, can you? You’re telling me you haven’t had been taken care of your entire life?”

“I’m telling you to call me Ben, but you seem to enjoy picking and choosing what things I say to hear.”

Rey laughs. It’s so unexpected that both start, still holding tight, and the connection feels voluntary somehow.

Too gently, too carefully, she withdraws her hand. “You still need a moisture pack.” And she breathes out, breathes one cool breath over his hot skin, while he doesn’t breathe at all.

“ _Ben_.”

 _Rey_.

**.**

He’s trying to read, alone in a pool of starlight, and it isn’t working. Nothing works anymore, he reflects bitterly, not his brain, not his tongue, not his better judgement – certainly not his better judgement, and his knuckles white on the bedframe. He has a headache building too, flaring into a supernova with the angle of the light coming in from the door, so he kicks at it.

A long, low whistle follows its closure.

“Alright, Excellency, I get the message.”

“That wasn’t – I didn’t –”

Supernova forgotten (all stars, in fact), Ben is standing, fumbling with his memo pad. She slips into the cabin and immediately stakes her claim to comfort: leaning against the doorframe, simultaneously blocking his escape route and owning her ship with a grace and ease he no longer possesses.

She glances out at the permanent night sky, pocked with distant galaxies. “You should get some sleep.”

“Shouldn’t _you_ get some sleep?”

“I’m not ready to sleep.”

Ben sits back down on the bed, if only to put some distance between them (as if his knees don’t want to fold like that, as if a few extra inches will do any good). He has over a foot of height on her, he’s an ambassador and she’s…small. Tiny, in fact. Beautiful, he knows, he gets it, don’t you think he gets that by now? Self-possessed too, with soft hair swinging around her face and eyes which go up a little at the corners.

Nonchalantly, again, without asking, again, Rey closes the space between them and onto the bed and onto him; her thighs frame his, pressing, and she doesn’t seem to care about precedence. She touches his brow, his cheekbone, the long line of his mouth. She is quiet, curious, utterly in control.

Ben Solo is the roar in his throat, the rushing in his veins.

“I have questions,” she murmurs.

“If they concern the political dynasties of the Outer Rim, I have answers.”

“They don’t.”

“Then I can’t.”

“You can.” She presses her lips to his, once, twice, welcomes the crushing pressure of his arms around her waist with an almost imperceptible roll of her hips.

Ben Solo is fire, wakefulness, joy.

“I have questions,” Rey whispers. “Excellency.”

“Ben.”

“ _Ben_.”

“Rey.”


End file.
